Food safety
Where supply strategies and ingredient expertise come together
Protect your customers. Protect your brand.
Food safety is a major concern for every food manufacturer. Even with best practices in place, there is still a risk that consumers mishandle raw flour or poorly prepare uncooked flour-based products. In fact, nearly half of consumers believe flour is safe to eat before cooking.1 And 53% of consumers taste refrigerated or frozen cookie dough before baking.2 Common misconceptions and routine-yet-risky behaviors like these can create risks for food brands.
At Ardent Mills, our solutions are built to protect your business and consumers. You can rely on our safe, healthy ingredients to help prevent product recalls.
Our commitment to food safety
With an unmatched history of pioneering food safety practices and protocols, Ardent Mills is your food safety ally. Our suite of food safety solutions was crafted by our experts to help you mitigate the everyday risks in food manufacturing. And we don’t stop there—we work directly with you to understand your specific needs and curate the right solutions to boost confidence and grow your brand.
When we talk about pathogen reduction, we approach it conservatively—we are simply stating the minimum reduction achieved in our products. For more than a decade, we’ve offered advanced heat treatment technology solutions. And we mill all of our wheat in pristine, BRC-certified facilities. Food safety is at the heart of everything we do.
Our food safety solutions
We’ve developed systems to help you reduce risk, maintain product integrity and protect consumer trust from production to consumption.
SafeGuard® Treatment
SafeGuard® Treatment is our advanced heat treatment technology. This integrated solution helps manufacturers treat traditional wheat flour, alternative grains, pulses, seeds and flakes, delivering up to a five-log validated pathogen reduction process to help ensure that products like cookie dough and cold-pressed bars are ready to eat.BakeSafer™ Treatment for Flour Products
BakeSafer™ Treatment helps reduce the food pathogen risks associated with consumer mishandling — such as under-baking, under-frying, uneven microwaving or cross-contamination — while maintaining the same trusted product quality. Our treatments can lower the level of pathogens in wheat flour, reducing the risk of pathogens by a minimum of 90%, observed up to 99.9%. And it doesn’t impact your existing formulation, process or performance.Get to know our solutions
| Applications | SafeGuard® Treatment For ready-to-eat applications (e.g., cold-pressed bars, cookie dough) | BakeSafer™ Treatment for Flour Products Ready-to-bake and ready-to-cook applications where kill step is performed by customer (e.g., frozen pizza, cake mix) |
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| Treatment | Heat treated | Milling treatment technology and incorporating organic acid |
| Benefits | 5-log pathogen reduction, meaning 99.999% decrease in microorganisms | Pathogen reduction by 90% minimum, observed up to 99.9% |
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Ingredients that can be treated |
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Functional and sensory results |
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- Wheat flours
- Amaranth flour (conventional and organic)
- Buckwheat flour light (conventional and organic)
- Buckwheat, intact (conventional and organic)
- Chickpea flour (conventional and organic)
- Corn flour
- Gluten-free Blends
- Millet (conventional and organic)
- Millet, intact (conventional and organic)
- Oat flour (conventional and organic)
- Rice flour (conventional and organic)
- Sorghum flour (conventional and organic)
- Sorghum, intact (conventional and organic)
- Sustagrain flakes
- Teff flour, brown or ivory
- Teff, intact
- Wheat flours
- Overall results showed that functionality was not impacted by treatment even at the maximum allowable level. As the treatment is applied to the tempered wheat, it has no effect on milled, refined end products.
- Analytical data for both hard and soft wheats showed very little difference from their corresponding untreated controls, even at the maximum allowed treatment concentration.
- Bake results were remarkably similar on all counts, both for bread and cookie applications.
- A sensory survey on the bread showed participants could find no significant difference in taste, appearance or smell.
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Frequently asked questions
Detailed information about our food safety efforts.
What kinds of products are appropriate for SafeGuard® treatment?
SafeGuard treatment is appropriate for products like cookie dough which do not include a “kill step” in their production but may still be eaten by a consumer. A “kill step,” such as cooking, baking, frying or boiling, eliminates or significantly reduces pathogens in food.
What kinds of products are appropriate for BakeSafer™ treatment?
BakeSafer treatment is appropriate for products like pizzas, pot pies, cakes and brownies, that depend on the consumer to cook them properly to reduce pathogens. BakeSafer reduces the risk of pathogens to a consumer that has mishandled products.
Can Ardent Mills help with identifying which treatment is right for a particular product?
Our team of experts is ready to help you identify potential pathogen risks and solutions to elevate your food safety certainty across every batch.
Safeguard delivers up to 5-log pathogen reduction. What does a 5-log pathogen reduction mean?
A five-log reduction means a 100,000-fold (or 99.999%) decrease in microorganisms.
Related content
1Journal of Food Protection Volume 85, Issue 1, January 2022, Pages 31-35; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0362028X22056332
2Ardent Mills Proprietary Research